Tricking Office 2008 updater
I’m not sure what the problem was, but every time I tried to update my Office 2008 installation, with the 12.1.1 updater, it would say there was no version of Office to update, even though there was. Perhaps it’s because I have Office 2004 also installed. I need to be compatible with some Office 2003 Windows users, and 2008 doesn’t do it in a variety of specific places. Read on to see how you can trick the installer into updating no matter what.
So anyways, I figured out how to get the update to apply in 3 easy steps.
- Create a script called find_office.sh and put the following contents in it:
#!/bin/sh
echo "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008"
exit 0- Make sure it’s executable by setting its execute permissions:chmod a+x find_office.sh
- Make sure that you put the right path to Office 2008 in the 2nd line, if you didn’t install in the standard path.
- Go into the .mpkg folder for your updater and move the real find_office program away. In my case, I had put the updater on my desktop, so these commands looked like this for me:
cd ~/Desktop/Office\ 2008\ SP1\ Update\ \(12.1.0\)/Contents/Resources
mv find_office find_office.orig - Copy your find_office.sh script to that location, and remove the .sh from its name. E.g.,:
cp ~/find_office.sh ./find_office - Now double-click the Updater. It will work. (At least it did for me)
Incidentally, this made it much faster, since the standard find_office program roams all over the hard drive looking for Office installations. It took about 3-4 minutes on my system to do that. My no-op script, obviously, takes a fraction of the time and works fine, as far as I can tell.